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Equality: The state of being equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities.

Equity: The quality of being fair and impartial.

As human beings we are not and will never be equal. We may be the same in some ways however certain characteristics, finger prints for example, make us all unique.

Economics makes it impossible for us to achieve equality since some will always have more than others and rightly so considering life is a series of choices and those choices depend upon our beliefs which are personal to our experiences in life. Some people value humanity, some money.

Equality is treating everyone the same.

Equity is giving everyone what they need to be successful.

Our current system of government seeks to make everyone equal without considering what is equitable.

A person caught stealing food to survive and a person stealing a car for a joy ride are both thieves, but for very different reasons.

In our society today, the person stealing food would most likely go to jail while the person stealing the car would receive probation.

Equality and justice for all are important concepts that we tend to confuse with being equal. We can achieve equality in our nation if we teach our children to respect themselves and others.

When we give everyone the opportunity to be successful, we are treating everyone the same. When we respects the gifts and talents everyone possesses, we will achieve equality and justice for all because there will be no need to steal food or a car and to do either would be a choice to break the law.

Instilling in our children a moral attitude of respect for self and others is the only way to ensure equality and justice for all.

When we provide every child in America with a developmentally appropriate, Arts based, experiential education concentrated on discovering, developing, and directing their gifts and talents towards becoming knowledgeable, actively engaged citizens, the differences that exist between us will be appreciated instead of hated.

Aug 6, 2015
Ed Pozzuoli, President of Fort Lauderdale based law firm Tripp Scott, sits down with Betsy DeVos, Chairman of the American Federation for Children, to discuss the school choice movement.

In this interview Ms. DeVos speaks about taking education out of the hands of the public and placing it in the hands of private corporations who have no problem funding their agenda.

In short, it is the intent of the American Federation for Children to “cut out the middle man”, the elected officials corporations have been paying to create the legislation that drives education down their path.

As the voice of the public increases, “hedgehogs” must increase their efforts to control education. This video is evidence of their increased efforts.

Once education is out of the hands of government, no longer publicly funded, Americans will have lost what little control we ever had to raise our voice against the corporate education agenda.

This is what happens when citizens are not actively engaged in controlling themselves, someone or something must control them for “the good of the whole” who are the elite.

What Ms. DeVos is proposing sounds reasonable to a great many people as educational failure increases and humans become slaves to the machines that are designed to think for them, replacing human ingenuity with data driven outcomes.

As education advocates fight to save public education, the corporate agenda appeals to the humanity of the individual by appearing to care about children, magnanimously offering to fund a better system of education by giving parents the opportunity to send their children to better schools.

The fact remains however, that education in America, regardless of the delivery system, is dehumanizing and segregationist and it is the intent of the “hedgehogs” for it to remain so.

Until we fight to save our children from the current system of education by changing it to one that concentrates on discovering, developing, and directing the gifts and talents of all children towards becoming knowledgeable, actively engaged citizens, we will continue to be ruled by the elite and their money.

“Betsy DeVos, president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for education secretary, is a billionaire and conservative mega-donor with no training or experience in public education. She is an ardent supporter of “school choice” privatization schemes, despite a complete lack of evidence that privatizing public schools produces better education.” NEA

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s bio reads, “In 1992, childhood friend and investment banker John W. Rogers, Jr., appointed Duncan director of the Ariel Education Initiative, a program mentoring children at one of the city’s worst-performing elementary schools and then assisting them as they proceeded further in the education system. After the school closed in 1996, Duncan and Rogers were instrumental in re-opening it as a charter school, Ariel Community Academy. In 1999, Duncan was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff for former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas. Wikipedia

The backgrounds of these individuals are similar and their beliefs on education are similar, so why is the NEA opposed to President elect Trump’s choice for education secretary?

It is interesting that an elected president does not have to choose his or her cabinet until after being voted into office.

If the public knows who the candidates will appoint prior to being elected we might have the opportunity to voice our opinion and be heard. However, once the candidate is elected, we have no choice in the matter.

The choice of advisors to the president is important and should not be an afterthought. The public should be informed, prior to the election process, who will advise the president and what their views on the issues of their office are as an integral part of the voting decision.

To reject the presidential cabinet after the election is futile.

It is for this reason that America remains under the control of the “hedgehogs” who purchase the decisions of the “corpoliticos” in order to maintain their control and profit margins.

Until we become knowledgeable, actively engaged citizens, united in the belief that we, the people, are the government, and take responsibility for our self governance, we will have no voice in our country’s leadership.

“Three programs aimed at reducing poverty in the Rochester area will receive significant funding from the state and some large private investments, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said during a stop Wednesday in Rochester.

In all, $16 million from the state will go to support Monroe Community College’s new Finger Lakes Workforce Development Center at Eastman Business Park, the Hillside Work-Scholarship Connection program and a new “Mentors for Success” pilot program by the Rochester-Monroe County Anti-Poverty Initiative.” D&C

Fighting poverty is like fighting crime. Before you can win the fight you have to expose the enemy as a deterrent to a successful life.

There are many organizations that are working to educate and employ individuals caught in the grip of poverty but few attack the psychology behind failure and why it is prevalent.

On the outside, the culture of poverty appears lucrative to those caught in its grip. Why?

In the past, if you lived in poverty the only way to escape was by obtaining a proper education, finding employment and then working diligently to maintain that employment.

Today however, it is easier to “work the system”, remain impoverished, and maintain a lifestyle of deception and hopelessness in order to receive payment for being uneducated, drug addicted, and criminalized.

By accepting their condition of poverty, one can have all their basic needs met through social programs, without having to contribute to the health and wellbeing of themselves or their family.

This is how the “hedgehogs” remain in power and how they maintain their profits. This is the millennium slavery.

By not educating our children to the power of righteousness, we are denying them the ability to break the bonds of the “hedgehogs” and reject the culture of poverty to which they have become accustomed.

We no longer require children to speak properly, write in cursive, or follow the fundamental aspects of respect and common curtesy, a smile, a hello, or a please and thank you when making a request.

Before we can end poverty, we must begin to teach self-respect and respect for others.

Our forefathers intended to increase the intelligence of the average American citizen by providing a public system of education that would allow them to be able to read and write at an eighth grade level.

Public schooling was supposed to free the citizenry of elitist control by giving them the means to learn about and know the issues they would face as the country matured and the population increased. An education was to provide the populous with the ability to rationally and intelligently, elect the local, state, and federal leaders of the country.

By educating the people, they would be able to govern themselves thereby securing the blessings of liberty that would keep us united as a country and free from the tyranny and oppression of the capitalistic elite who supported and maintained indentured servitude and slavery.

A public school education was not supposed to “normalize” and “standardize” the population, providing companies with compliant workers who were satisfied with what they were given for their days labor.

Education advocates are fighting against President Trump’s education agenda of providing vouchers to parents who do not want their children to be part of a system of education that dehumanizes and “dumbs them down”. They are not fighting to change the current system of education to one that supports a humanistic approach to education that has been proven successful for most children instead of only a few.

Education advocates are fighting to save public education when public education forces our children onto excessively heated busses early in the morning that carry them out of their neighborhood and into overcrowded classrooms, being taught by racially biased, underqualified teachers, to be assessed by norms that exclude every group of children except middle-income white males.

When we provide every child in America with a free and public education that is developmentally appropriate, founded in the Arts, experiential and concentrated on discovering, developing, and directing their individual gifts and talents towards becoming knowledgeable, actively engaged citizens, public education will no longer be fraudulent and vouchers will no longer be necessary.

Federal Definition of Gifted and Talented
“The term ‘gifted and talented,” . . . means students, children, or youth who give evidence of high achievement capability in such areas as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields, and who need services or activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop those capabilities.”

“No gifted individual is exactly the same, each with his own unique patterns and traits. There are many traits that gifted individuals have in common, but no gifted learner exhibits traits in every area.” NAGC

Children love to learn. In fact, learning is how every child becomes successful in their environment. We know and accept this of every other animal on Earth yet we humans, sentient beings, seem to ignore this fact when it comes to our own children.

Every child has a gift, every child is talented in some way that is meant to contribute to the evolution of mankind.

It is important to understand that not everyone is gifted and talented in everything but that every individual upon entering this experience we call life, has a unique role to play in the quest for the answer to the meaning of life.

It is incumbent upon those of us who have lived and learned from our experiences to relate what we have learned to those who have yet to learn. Our current system of education does not fulfill this objective.

The film, “Most Likely to Succeed” makes this point very well, children learn by doing, not by sitting, hearing, seeing, or reading, but by doing.

The youtube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhoWYZN2_Rg is a synopsis of the film which shows the importance of experiential learning and how engaged students become in learning when allowed to discover, develop and direct their gifts and talents towards solving a problem.

Rochester is scheduled for an upcoming screening of the entire film: Most Likely to Succeed
Wednesday, December 7 at 6:00 PM
Brighton Memorial Library
2300 Elmwood Avenue
Rochester, NY 14618

All children deserve to be recognized and respected for their individual gifts and talents.

Agency Information Collection Activities; Submission to the Office of Management and Budget for Review and Approval; Comment Request; Grants to Charter Management Organizations for Replication and Expansion of High-Quality Charter Schools Program

Abstract: The major purposes of the CSP are to expand opportunities for all students, particularly traditionally underserved students, to attend charter schools and meet challenging State academic standards; provide financial assistance for the planning, program design, and initial implementation of public charter schools; increase the number of high-quality charter schools available to students across the United States; evaluate the impact of charter schools on student achievement, families, and communities; share best practices between charter schools and other public schools; encourage States to provide facilities support to charter schools; and support efforts to strengthen the charter school authorizing process. . . Respondents are non-profit Charter Management Organizations interested in applying for funding under the CMO program.

Type of Review: A new information collection.
Total Estimated Number of Annual Responses: 50.
Total Estimated Number of Annual Burden Hours: 2,000.

The research has been done and it has been found that charter schools are no more effective in educating our children than public schools.

Awarding more grant money to non-profit Charter Management Organizations will accomplish nothing more than adding another layer of administrative costs that siphon off valuable education tax dollars from the actual education of children.

The feds also reap the benefits of this new information collection by paying employees for working 400 hours to assess the responses of fifty applicants.

It seems that adults will benefit from charter school expansion to a higher degree than the children who are not receiving even a proper education.

If we know what charter school programs work, why not implement those programs in public schools?

If CMO’s work, why not have them work with public schools that are already established?

The proliferation of charter schools is not intended to destroy public schools, its purpose is to maintain the ignorance that keeps us from changing the current system of education to one that will actually educate our children.